United States: Cultural Heritage Management Education

Introduction

Since the Society for American Archaeology issued its turn-of-the-century call for a renewed vision for archaeology education (Bender & Smith 2000), a profound change has taken root in this endeavor. Contributors to the 2000 SAA volume noted that the conceptual structure of archaeology’s curricula had changed little since the mid-twentieth century, despite significant advances in method, theory, data accumulation, and the contexts in which archaeological research was conducted. Major advances in scientific data acquisition techniques, analytical methods, and theoretical modeling had kept academic archaeologists’ vision of the discipline centered on its historiographic research aspects, yet at the same time the introduction of historic preservation law in the USA introduced a specifically public context for the discipline’s practice. In 2000, the call was for those who teach archaeology to acknowledge its public dimensions and begin to train students to understand and...